Employees increasingly are not limited to company-provided devices when performing employment tasks. As more and more employees bring personal mobile devices, such as smart phones and tablets to the workplace, as well as use them in remote locations for connecting back to the office, conventional firewalls have struggled with an inability to define rules for controlling access of these devices to enterprise resources.
Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) (also called Bring Your Own Technology (BYOT), Bring Your Own Phone (BYOP), and Bring Your Own PC (BYOPC)) refers to the policy of permitting employees to bring personally owned mobile devices (laptops, tablets, and smart phones) to their workplace, and to use those devices to access privileged company information and applications.
According to some sources, BYOD is making significant inroads in the business world, with about 75% of employees in high growth markets such as Brazil and Russia and 44% in developed markets already using their own technology at work, whether or not company policy expressly allows BYOD. Some believe that BYOD may help employees be more productive. Others say it increases employee morale and convenience by using their own devices and makes the company look like a flexible and attractive employer. Some companies feel that BYOD can even be a means to attract new hires, pointing to a survey that indicates 44% of job seekers view an organization more positively if it supports their device.
Conventional firewall access rules or policies have relied on one dimensional access rules such as “Allow IP address X into network Y” and “Deny user X access to the Internet,” etc. Such access rules are insufficient in BYOD environments.